Review: The Matrix Reloaded

Last night, as I shopped for oranges and pears, the green­gro­cer asked me where I was from, as if it couldn’t pos­si­bly be Australia. (This was partly because I’d never heard of some type of Aus­tralia pear but whatever.) Why is this? I get this quite a lot. Do I speak funny?

I saw The Matrix Reloaded yes­ter­day afternoon. (In the af­ter­noon because it was part of a work “team building” exercise. It was really weird to come out of the cinema and have it still be daylight, let me just say.) Anyway, it’s quite good! Visually, it’s not as strong or co­he­sive as the first, and Neo is way too powerful, but there’s an amazing amount of in­ter­est­ing phi­los­o­phy of the tra­di­tional sci-fi sort (i.e. the topics of free will (most of the char­ac­ters who have an opinion about it insist there is no such thing), the nature of time, mul­ti­ple universes, per­ceived reality versus reality, and so on) as well as the nature and im­pli­ca­tions of belief, and the pos­si­bil­i­ties of love. (Actually, it occurs to me now that the whole thing could turn out very re­li­gious in the end. Which I wouldn’t mind.)

Other notes: (1) there’s an in­cred­i­bly long word­less rave scene that for­tu­nately stops at about the same time you realise that no-one has said any­thing for quite a long time, and begin to wonder why the Wa­chowskis have in­serted a music video into the middle of a movie; (2) there’s a trailer to the next Matrix movie after the credits; (3) the power-station hacking scene is surprisingly realistic; (4) Morpheus’s speech des­per­ately needed a rewrite; (5) the Oracle died almost two years ago!